by Jeff Carlson
Each breath was a chore. The pain made her hurry. The pain lessened when she kept pace with the tether, allowing hints of slack in the line. At some point, she’d broken a rib. The bone must have nicked her lung. Only the no-shock and her adrenaline had kept her from noticing.
Vonnie found herself at the front of the lander. The tether had brought her back. She needed to climb the steps and she’d reach the air lock—
—but she screamed when the horizon flipped, pivoting the ice beneath her—
—as she whacked into the steps—
—and rose with Lander 04 as it hovered over the abyss. Below her, the jeep dropped away. Something else flopped toward the lander’s belly. It was the charging post. It swung into the invisible exhaust of the fusion jets.
Vonnie couldn’t see most of what happened. The lander’s steps and armored skirt concealed its fusion jets, where the post was vaporized in a searing blue-white flare. She blinked and blinked and couldn’t regain vision in her left eye. Radiation burns cooked her feet. Dangling from the harness felt like being impaled on a sword, and she oozed tears that tracked up her forehead into her hair.
Losing consciousness would have been a mercy. But she fought. Trying to right herself, Vonnie squinted with her good eye as the jets tore into the ice below, buffeting her with freezing water vapor.
Normally their landers had deployed foil shields for each lift-off, preserving the ice. Now there was nothing to spare, although Ash banked around the center of the massive hole, where lights stabbed up from the debris or glowed beneath the surface.
Vonnie glimpsed a listening post and the gray corner of a metal structure. “I have a visual on Module 03,” she groaned.
Ash cried on the radio: “Von! Von!? Are you there!?”
“…yes.”
“I’m putting us down! Wait for me! Von!? I’m putting us down in thirty seconds!”
She really is sorry, Vonnie thought distantly. Maybe she smiled. She wanted to smile. She’d saved her friends. That should count for something, but she ached. Her body had been beaten, gashed, baked, and chilled. It was impossible to feel anything except her misery.
They left the chaos behind. Glancing back, Vonnie saw an oval-shaped canyon with a separate, smaller sink hole to one side. The canyon was at least two kilometers long and half as wide. It had swallowed most of the ESA camp.
“Maps,” she whispered.
Through the gore on her visor, her display awoke with beacons and data/comm. Module 02 was safe. Several supply containers and Module 01 also remained on the surface, although 01 laid on its side near a cliff.
Their other flightcraft, Lander 05, was among the survivors. It took to the air in a white gust and crossed toward 01 instead of attempting to latch onto 03.
“Why…”
The low-level AI in her visor responded to her disoriented stare. It coupled her display of the battered ESA surface grid with threat analysis from ESA and NASA satellites.
Growing fractures cleaved through the ice beneath Module 01. Soon the cliff side would give way. The crew in Lander 05 were evacuating Koebsch before he toppled into the devastation with 03.
There was ongoing activity beneath the ice. Geysers and hot gas continued to erode vast pockets in the pit. There would be aftershocks.
Heedless of their own vulnerability, squads of mecha tugged at Modules 01 and 02, dragging the modules westward. Other mecha trundled across the ice. They formed chains into the pit. Already the mecha were evaluating the debris. Welding torches licked at the shadows, fusing the ice into pathways and bridges.
New pain woke Vonnie from her dream. Her harness pulled on her waist and her legs clunked against the underside of the lander’s steps, folding her over her broken rib.
Frerotte leaned over her, but his voice seemed to come from far away. “Can you hear me?”
He was attached to his own tether. He hefted Vonnie from the steps. Their lander was still in the air, although it was sinking toward an open, solid plain.
“Clear! We’re clear!” he shouted.
Another white cloud exploded beneath the lander as they touched down, scorching the ice.
Frerotte unclipped Vonnie’s line. Up the steps, the exterior door of the air lock stood open. Frerotte jogged inside with her limp body in his arms, smacking her helmet against the wall as he punched the controls. “Fuck! Fuck me! Are you—?”
“Aft.. shocks…” she slurred.
“We know. It’s okay. We know.”
The inner door opened. Metzler was waiting. He helped Frerotte set her down. It felt like the lander had taken off again. Vonnie wasn’t sure if the feeling of acceleration was real. Her thoughts rose and fell in waves.
Pleasant feelings brought her back. A gentle warmth coursed through her body. She was on the floor of the ready room near the hatch to data/comm, where Ash was shouting. Vonnie remained blind in her left eye, but she saw Metzler and Frerotte had stripped off her pressure suit and the jump suit she’d worn inside. A medical droid hung between the two men where it had extended from the ceiling, connecting her heart, neck, wrists, and stomach to emergency systems.
Nanotech and optimized blood plasma fed through her veins from subdermal packets and intravenous lines. The frostbite in her arm felt like simmering oil. The radiation burns on her legs felt like snow. Everywhere her nerves sang and twitched.
“Another quake dropped the west side of the pit!” Ash yelled as other voices shouted from their group feed:
“The mecha lost visual on 03—”
“—no beacons or—”
“—secure 02 if you can.”
“I need help up here!” Ash yelled. “Ben, she’s tied in! There’s nothing more you can do!”
“Go,” Vonnie muttered, trying to sit. She winced at the pain in her ribs and feet, but the wounds were manageable now. “You two shouldn’t…”
“Your arm is bleeding,” Metzler said.
“You shouldn’t play doctor with me while I’m unconscious. Where are my clothes?”
“She’s fine,” Frerotte said with a fierce grin. He clapped Metzler on the shoulder, shoving him toward data/comm. Metzler’s eyes were round with terror and affection, but he left.
Vonnie listened to them as the jets thrummed.
“Ben, load these sims into your scout suit,” Ash said. “You might have to cut off 02’s war pods if we can’t wedge it into our cargo lock.”
“Roger that,” Metzler said.
“Ribeiro’s reporting backwash through the FNEE grid,” Frerotte said. “This thing was huge.”
“They swore they’d send mecha to help us,” Ash said.
“There’s a FNEE lander in the air and a few rovers coming across the surface,” Frerotte said. “I’ll coordinate. Koebsch is over the pit with 05. It looks like they’re trying to shoot a harpoon into the ice.”
“How far down is 03?” Metzler said.
“Beacons put them at half a kilometer and sinking fast,” Frerotte said. “They lost pressure six minutes ago. No radio or data/comm. It doesn’t look good.”
“Von, you’ve got to move!” Metzler shouted. “I’m coming to armor up!”
He ran through the hatch. Vonnie scooched on her hip in a web of IV lines and monitors, freeing the space near their scout suits. She felt more coherent. She grimaced as she tallied the deaths among her people and the sunfish.
We’ll dig for 03 if it takes forever, she thought. We’ll start again. But we’ve lost so much.
The sunfish lost even more, but the floods will harden into a solid layer between us. The new ice might be two or three kilometers thick. By the time we get back through, they’ll be long gone. Won’t they?
They gave up their home. We gave up two people.
Despite everything, her crew had underestimated Europa again. The sunfish had won after all.
For now.
Recovering Module 03 Map
44.
Seven hours passed before they recovered Module 03. Worki
ng with Koebsch, Gravino had attached a line to the module ten minutes after the catastrophe, but the harpoon tore loose in the first aftershocks. Then the module was pulled deeper. Nearly all of their remaining mecha disappeared in the new quakes. The rims of the canyon collapsed, taking the mecha into the pit, where the ice sluffed away like sand in an hourglass, backfilling the rifts beneath the surface.
Swimming against the sinking avalanche, nine mecha reached safety where the flood had created solid blocks. Twelve more were submerged, yet pried themselves loose and resumed tunneling toward Module 03, fusing the ice wherever possible. The rest of the machines were completely buried, yet remained operational, continuing to function as radar and sonar arrays.
With so many mecha taken by the disaster, the ESA possessed a disorderly spiral of assets down through 1.8 kilometers. Metzler and Frerotte were able to develop sims predicting the next aftershocks.
In a sense, they were fortunate. The new layer formed by the blow-out was a foundation that wouldn’t allow the surface to crumple further. The ice needed to settle, but it should protect them from new cataclysms. Metzler thought the sheet would redirect any currents of water and gas laterally.
Magma was a different hazard. If the quakes had opened new fissures, chain reactions of fire and gas might consume the ESA and FNEE camps. It would be years before this region was stable again.
Vonnie prayed the sunfishes’ work had been well-measured. How accurate were their perceptions of the reservoirs they’d unleashed and the volcanic activity within the fin mountain?
The larger sunfish might have destroyed Tom’s home as an acceptable price for eradicating the mecha, but she didn’t believe they would have fricasseed their own tribe in the bargain.
Lying in her blood on the floor of the ready room, she imagined the flood must have waned before it spread to the colony of the larger sunfish. Maybe a few had suffered scrapes or bruises. Their cartilage skins were so resilient, their bodies so flexible. If the water had cooled, none of them had been boiled to death. They could breathe underwater.
As long as they climbed from the deluge before it froze again, the tribe would persevere. That meant their suicide squad had been fairly certain how the hot springs, ice, quakes, and magma chambers would interact.
Was that possible?
They’ve survived down there for tens of thousands of years, she reminded herself, blinking and struggling to keep her head up as the warm feelings in her body turned to lethargy.
She didn’t remember sleep. She was still fretting when she woke in her bed in Lander 04’s living quarters, her wrists and stomach connected to another med droid.
A display had been unfolded from the wall. It provided her friends with a camera to watch her while she slept. One of the windows in the group feed showed her rubbing her cheek before she realized the bleary-eyed woman was herself, although most of the windows in the group feed were blank. She could only see the people inside Lander 04 with her.
She’d missed most of the rescue. Someone had told their AI to sedate her so they could carry her from the ready room. Leaving her unconscious had also permitted the med droids to operate on her face and her legs, replacing her left eye and disturbing amounts of marrow, muscle, and skin.
Her eye socket felt gritty and too sensitive when she skimmed her display, where Frerotte had posted a summary before he instructed the AI to wake her.
There was also more conversation than usual in the next compartment. The voices weren’t from a group feed. Ash had taken O’Neal and Johal on board. None of them would reoccupy the hab modules until they were positive they’d located a safe place to camp, if there was a safe place. Until then, the crew would remain with their two flightcraft.
Lander 04 sat on the ice three kilometers east of the pit. Its jets were hot — Vonnie felt the deck humming — and the pilot’s command link was designated Ashley Sierzenga.
“Hello?” she said, bending her knees beneath her blankets so she could touch her feet. Her toes and one calf were numb.
“Hey, it’s sleeping beauty,” Ash said on the display as her voice drifted through the hatch. They were three meters apart, but Ash didn’t leave the lander’s controls. They studied each other on their displays.
Ash seemed jittery and distracted. “How do you feel?” she said. “Can you take my seat?”
“You’ve been piloting since the blow-out?” Vonnie double-checked her clock. From their initial call to Tavares, to the probes’ encounter with Tom’s pack, to Lam’s assault on 114, to the four hours they’d spent guiding the FNEE mecha, to the battle with the sunfish and its aftermath, Ash had been on duty for twenty hours straight. “I can fly if someone helps me up,” Vonnie said. “You should sleep.”
“That’s not the issue,” Ash said, glancing at her own window in the group feed.
What was she looking at? Vonnie noticed a medical alert bar on Ash’s display, projecting the limits of her effectiveness.
“Most of us are on stims and no-shock,” Ash said. “I’m okay for more, but I need to get outside. I’m the medic. They need me outside.”
She’s not okay, Vonnie realized. She’s on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
Staving off exhaustion with chemicals caused elevated blood pressure, slight memory loss, and clumsiness. Other side effects were more conspicuous. During Vonnie’s run through the frozen sky, she’d experienced the same obsessive mood Ash was exhibiting now, dealing with her hyper-sensitive state by speaking and acting with careful repetition.
Ash would feel like someone fighting to keep her balance on a high wire. No amount of masochism could atone for her role in the butchery, yet Vonnie knew better than to insist she should rest. Ash would need to ride through the drugs until Koebsch or their med droids shut her down.
Vonnie shifted her legs out of bed. Her left foot was dead from nerve blocks. It felt like a sock full of meat had been attached to her ankle, where the skin was new, raw, and pale. “Where are Pärnits and Collinsworth?” she asked.
“O’Neal, help her,” Ash said.
No one answered Vonnie. O’Neal entered the living quarters and knelt to disconnect her IVs.
In his forties, with the physique of a dedicated gym buff, O’Neal was a fussy introvert with big curly hair. Weeks ago, the clash between his personality and his lush mane had perplexed Vonnie until she decided he was acting out against his own subdued nature. She liked him for it.
“Don’t take off your monitors,” he said, indicating the electrodes on her chest. “Keep your weight off your foot.” He took hold of her waist as she crooked her elbow around the back of his neck. Together, they stood and hobbled toward data/comm.
His silence meant the worst. No miracles had accompanied the retrieval of Module 03.
They’re dead, she thought, recalling her friend’s lean, hawk-nosed face and sly grin. She had just begun to know Rauno Pärnits intimately. He was as educated as Metzler, as devoted, as passionate.
He’d defended the sunfish. Like Collinsworth, Pärnits had reveled in their bizarre language, trading everything in his life for the chance to stand on Europa, listen, learn, and develop roughhewn dialogues with scouts like Tom and Sue. In the end, his own species had been responsible for his death.
Vonnie and O’Neal entered data/comm. Frerotte had the station beside Ash, but he didn’t look up, engrossed in a field of holo imagery. Beside him was Harmeet Johal, one of their gene smiths, a dusky woman in her fifties who fit the same bill as O’Neal. She was composed and considerate.
Johal looked like she was supervising mecha with Frerotte. Vonnie didn’t see Metzler. Where was he? O’Neal brought her to an open station, where she said, “Maps and grid.”
Ash tried to stop her. “Wait.”
“I have to see where we are,” Vonnie said, dropping into her chair as voices filled her display.
“Ben, stop it,” Koebsch said on the radio.
“I won’t! I can’t!”
The two ESA landers sat si
de by side on the surface with Module 03, which they’d dragged from the pit. Outside, Metzler and Koebsch were on the ice. They wore scout suits joined to the flightcraft by tethers. Vonnie also saw two more landers nearby, a NASA heavy lifter and a FNEE suborbital fighter, and Koebsch had opened a data link with the Chinese camp. Their neighbors had come to their aid for the duration.
Why couldn’t they pretend there was always an emergency? If so, Earth would be at peace. The small, isolated crews of astronauts were proof of humankind’s nobility… but she knew Earth’s populations were neither small nor isolated.
Later, she would mourn. For now, Vonnie scanned their grid with calculating eyes.
The NASA and FNEE craft were parked six kilometers from the pit, where ESA Modules 01 and 02 had been dropped with nine storage containers and one jeep. The two ESA landers were half that distance from the lost camp. Dawson and Gravino were aboard Lander 05. Gravino had the helm. Dawson was in sick bay. His vitals listed a concussion and a broken wrist. Nano repairs were ongoing to maintain a reduction of swelling in his parietal lobe.
Vonnie wasn’t sure how to feel about the fact that he’d been hurt. Should she feel happy?
To make room inside their landers, she supposed Ash and Gravino could have offloaded her and Dawson to the NASA flightcraft, but the ESA took care of its own.
That’s what we’re doing now, she realized.
Outside, Koebsch stood at the crumpled box of Module 03 with a squad of mecha, which had painstakingly removed parts of the module’s floor. Away from the module, Metzler paced alongside a single mecha carrying an emergency plastic bubble.
Under Koebsch’s guidance, the other mecha extended lasers and cutting tools. “Let me concentrate,” Koebsch said as Metzler shouted, “We should have left them down there! We should’ve left them down there like Bauman and Lam!”
Chunks of ice had filled 03 when it was breached. Before the power shut off, some of the ice had melted. Then the liquid resolidified, adhering to the module’s equipment, its furniture, and its inhabitants.